Writer, Interrupted

The resurrection of Henry Roth.

In 1993, I went to visit Henry Roth, a man as famous for his decades of silence as for the great novel he had published almost sixty years earlier, “Call It Sleep.” Roth was living in Albuquerque, in a converted funeral home (by then everything about him was symbolic), but his mind was bound by the geography of his childhood—Brownsville, the Lower East Side, Harlem. He was an eighty-seven-year-old man still fuelled by childhood dreams and traumas, powering around the house on a rolling walker, cursing and singing and explaining. At one point during my stay, Roth asked me to drive him to the doctor. “At least you’ll be making yourself useful,” he observed. He was in an expansive mood during the drive; when we stopped at a traffic light, he suddenly declaimed, “Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them.” His voice had the crooning humor of a highbrow vaudevillian. But then I missed an exit and Roth’s mood grew suddenly dark. “When you make one wrong turn,” he said ruefully, “the errors tend to compound.”

But Roth, despite his own dramatic detour, did not remain in outer darkness. When I visited him, he had shattered the block that had imprisoned him and was on the verge of publishing the first installment of a vast, multivolume work, “Mercy of a Rude Stream.” His hands were warped by rheumatoid arthritis; the very touch of his computer keyboard was excruciating. But he still put in five hours a day, helped by Percocet, beer, a ferocious will, and the ministrations of several young assistants. Roth would not die like a pomegranate, with all his seeds inside.

The reasons for Roth’s monumental block—which include but are not limited to Communism, Jewish self-loathing, incest, and depression—are ultimately as mysterious as the reasons for his art and are in some ways inseparable from them. In a new biography, “Redemption” (Norton; $25.95), Steven G. Kellman does an excellent job of exploring Roth’s creative life, its grim cessation and its miraculous rebirth. The biography’s title is perfect, not simply because Roth found in his fallow years an ultimate source of inspiration but because his life made sense to him only when seen in a religious light, as a story of sin and repentance, exile and return. “Righteousness, righteousness shalt thou pursue,” Roth declared the first day I met him, quoting Deuteronomy as a kind of commentary on his entire life. In his own eccentric pursuit of it, he made one of the most haunting journeys in American literature.

Roth was born in 1906 in the Galician town of Tysmenitz, now part of Ukraine. His father, Chaim, left for America that same year, and little Herschel, as he was then called, and his mother followed in 1907. Chaim was the ne’er-do-well son of the manager of a distillery. Like Albert Schearl, the character based on Roth’s father in “Call It Sleep”—a man who torments his wife and beats his son mercilessly—Chaim seems to have poisoned everything he touched with his bad luck and wrathful temperament. His wife had married him only under family pressure, after disgracing herself by falling in love with a Gentile.

The family spent two years in Brooklyn and then moved to the Lower East Side, in those days the most densely populated piece of land on earth and later the setting of Roth’s novel. In “Call It Sleep,” there are safe, sensual moments when young David Schearl is home alone with his mama in their walkup apartment, but below is the cellar, the home of rats, darkness, and forbidden sexuality. How this buried region seeps into the upstairs world is part of the drama of the novel. David is led into a clothes closet by a girl with a leg brace and a style of speaking memorably captured in the shackled lilt of Roth’s phonetically rendered urban dialect:

“Yuh know w’ea babies comm from?”

“N-no.”

“From de knish.”

“—Knish?”

“Between de legs. Who puts id in is de poppa. De poppa’s god de petzel. Yaw de poppa.” She giggled stealthily and took his hand. He could feel her guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm. Revolted, he drew back.

Nothing quite obliterates sentimental associations with the Lower East Side like the transformation of “knish” into slang for female genitalia. At times, the novel can seem like “Lord of the Flies” played out among the Dead End Kids:

One glance at their tough, hostile faces, smirched by the grime and rust of the junk heap and screwed up into malicious watchfullness was enough. David’s eyes darted about for an opening. There was none except back to the dock.

Roth came to despise this representation of his childhood, which he felt was a falsification. In interviews and, later, in the autobiographical “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” Roth depicted his life on the Lower East Side as an idyllic time, spent in a secure, cohesive Jewish world that fell apart when he was eight and the family moved to Harlem. Though Harlem had a large Jewish population, the Roths lived in a substantially Irish neighborhood. As Roth later saw it, this was where he learned to hate himself as a Jew, believing the frequent taunts that Jews cared only about money, and envying the Irish toughs who teased and beat him. His Jewish religious education was interrupted, his sense of belonging to a people thwarted. It was, he said, the most traumatic dislocation of his life.

Roth’s characterization of his Harlem exile as a kind of hell makes more sense when considered alongside the revelation that it was there that he began an incestuous relationship with his sister, Rose. According to Kellman, Roth had been “groping” his sister since he was twelve and she was ten; by the time Roth was sixteen he was having intercourse with her. When he was eighteen, he also seduced his fourteen-year-old first cousin Sylvia, leading her into the basement at a bris.

Nearly seventy years later, when I interviewed him, Roth had not yet gone public with his secret, only with the hint that there was a secret. But it was clear from the vehemence with which he spoke of “the louse I was, who I detested” that he viewed his youthful self as evil. Kellman sees the incest as “a dramatic manifestation of immigrant insecurity, the newcomers’ inability to invest their emotions in anything beyond the reassuring confines of the clan.” Incest does function in Roth’s later work as an emblem of ingrown, immigrant misery, but the guilt that Roth felt hung over him like a kind of Biblical curse.

When he was nineteen, Roth was saved from Harlem and its miseries by a petite, Protestant professor of English literature, Eda Lou Walton, who was twelve years Roth’s senior. Born in New Mexico, she had a Ph.D. from Berkeley, where she had studied anthropology and English. She had studied poetry with Witter Bynner and translated Navajo verse. Walton had recently moved to New York to teach at New York University, where she became the teacher—and lover—of Roth’s boyhood friend Lester Winter. Roth, who was attending City College, would travel downtown after his own classes to join them and the many writers and would-be writers who gathered in Walton’s apartment in the Village.

Walton saw genius in the awkward, self-conscious Roth. He began visiting her without Winter, and a platonic intensity developed between them. She shared with him the complex details of her bohemian romantic life, and he eventually confessed his incest to her, presumably finding, in her unjudging, anthropological curiosity, a kind of temporary absolution. But most of all she encouraged his literary dreams. Walton introduced him to the work of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, lending him a copy of “Ulysses,” still banned in the United States, that she had smuggled back from Paris. From Joyce, Roth learned that the rough ghetto world he had grown up in was fit material for high art.

Gradually, Roth replaced his friend—who didn’t appreciate Eliot and went on to become a dentist—in Walton’s affections. “She took me under her wing and into her bed,” Roth told me, though the bed remained crowded—even Walton’s friend Margaret Mead, no prude, referred to Walton’s promiscuity as “desperate.” On weekends, Roth was ousted to make room for David Mandel, a labor lawyer from New Jersey, whom Walton eventually married. Roth already had enough sexual shame in the bank to live off the interest for the rest of his life, but, despite this new layer of humiliation—compounded by financial support that he received from her—Roth’s time with Walton was essential for the production of “Call It Sleep.”

The novel, which remains one of the masterpieces of American literature, is dedicated to Walton and was written in blue books from N.Y.U. that she provided. Roth spent four years writing “Call It Sleep,” but it has the quality of a book composed in a kind of dream. The world seems sculpted out of light and shadow, and all the elements of this Manichaean universe are equally perilous. The cellar door that terrifies David “bulged with darkness.” Outside, there is “light so massive stout brick walls could scarcely breast it when it leaned upon them; light that seemed to shiver windows with a single beam.” There is a rhapsodic musicality to the novel, a Joycean flow of words, but there is also ominous tension on almost every page. The air, the emotions, the accents are all thick, throwing off violent sparks, like the great burst of electrical energy from the trolley tracks that knocks the young hero into unconsciousness at the book’s end.

No doubt this tension—a harbinger, in some sense, of his future block—derives from the agony Roth felt in writing an autobiographical novel that concealed the most traumatic fact of his own autobiography. (The novel’s manuscript was actually typed by his sister, Rose.) Furthermore, Roth was writing about Jews, although, as he later put it, “all he asked of a book was not to remind him too much that he was a Jew.” And surely there are sociological explanations for this sense of irreconcilable forces colliding in the world of the novel. By the early thirties, when Roth was writing the book, America had shut its doors to immigrants, and nativism and anti-Semitism were on the rise. Roth draws much of this outer opposition into the Jewish world he depicts, making it seem a world turned violently against itself. A rabbi tells his students, “Let me hear you wink and I’ll tear you not into shreds but into shreds of shreds!”

It is fascinating to read “Call It Sleep” in the light of Roth’s later insistence that he imposed on his Lower East Side childhood the disruptions of his Harlem life. He also claimed that he had made David a pathetic victim when in fact he was a villain—a notion that makes sense only if David is guilty of Roth’s own sins and in some sense deserving of his father’s terrible blows. A key element of the plot of “Call It Sleep” is David’s willingness to act as pander for a bullying street kid named Leo intent on “playin’ bad” with David’s cousin Esther. The tryst, David’s receipt of a rosary as payment, and the savage beating that ensues all reverberate with dark, confessional overtones once the reader knows that Roth seduced his own cousin.

It would be a shame if “Call It Sleep” were now mistaken for an encrypted cry for exculpation, just as it is a shame that the book has often been mistaken for a mere immigrant novel—an important one, to be sure, but limited to the plight of newcomers struggling in a strange land. The book is many things, but at root it is a religious work, and much of its enduring power comes from the way Roth harnesses the Biblical to the contemporary. The third of the book’s four sections is called “The Coal,” a reference to a passage from Isaiah, which young David hears, describing the purifying touch of divine fire on the lips of the prophet. David is obsessed with discovering this spark in his own life, and mistakes the electricity pulsing under the trolley tracks for a manifestation of God’s power. The fact that it knocks him out only enhances the uncanny force of the association—David is like the hapless figure in the Book of Samuel who puts his hand out to steady the Ark and is struck dead on the spot.

Roth’s novel sold fewer than two thousand copies when it was published, in 1934, but it was hailed in many reviews, if primarily in sociological terms, and Kellman, who notes that at the time one in four households was on relief, does an admirable job of documenting the critical response. The Herald Tribune called the novel “the most accurate and profound study of an American slum childhood that has yet appeared.” The Times claimed that Roth had “done for the East Side what James T. Farrell is doing for the Chicago Irish.” But Roth, already attracted to Communism, was stung by the criticism of The New Masses, a Communist publication, which faulted the novel for the very artistry that makes it great: “It is a pity that so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their working-class experience.”

The fragile sense of himself that Roth had managed to sustain while writing “Call It Sleep” was breaking down. Though Roth was a genuine working-class kid from a real slum, he was, in his own eyes, a degenerate—the kept man of an effete bourgeoise. Communism was for Roth (as it was, ironically, for many Jews) in part a rebuke to anti-Semitic notions about Jews and money. Having absorbed these ideas, Roth took the criticism of The New Masses personally. The financial and sexual humiliations of living with Walton had begun to outweigh her ability to erase his earlier shame.

Roth’s quest to “be a man,” of which Communism formed a part, was lifelong. When I met him—after he had been a boxer, a tool grinder, a ditchdigger, a hospital attendant, a slaughterer of waterfowl—he still spoke in an almost childlike way about the need to learn to fend for himself. He was mourning the death of his wife of half a century, Muriel Parker, and he told me that, though he had been deeply devoted to her, her death was a kind of “gift,” because it forced him, in his mid-eighties, to take care of himself for the first time, to balance his checkbook, to pay his own taxes.

Roth joined the Party in 1934, disregarding Walton’s warning that it would ruin his fiction, and set about writing a “proletarian” novel about an illiterate Communist organizer he knew, a charismatic former criminal who had lost a hand in a factory accident and seemed to Roth to be everything he himself was not. In some sense, Roth was like D. H. Lawrence, who suffered under a rough working-class father, demonized in “Sons and Lovers” but also turned into a touchstone of masculine authenticity. Roth later speculated that he had been defeated by his proletarian novel because he found himself increasingly attracted to the real-life model for the book; he considered homosexuality a “degeneration” into which he was in danger of falling. But, as with everything about Roth, there were multiple reasons. All of them fed the grim paradox of his block: he needed to flee the man he was in order to survive, but his art and, in some sense, his ultimate survival depended on his coming to terms with that abandoned self.

David Mandel, the man who frequently displaced Roth in Walton’s bed, and who helped get “Call It Sleep” published, persuaded Maxwell Perkins—the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe—to publish Roth’s new novel, but Roth burned the manuscript before that could happen. He had been beaten up trying to organize dockworkers that day, and decided that he was a phony proletarian just as he’d been a phony artist. Mandel and Walton found him bruised and bloody, singing the “Internationale,” with the remains of the novel smoldering in the fireplace.

Roth did not move out of Walton’s apartment until 1938, but he was already moving away from her. During a stint at the writers’ colony Yaddo (arranged by Walton), Roth met Muriel Parker, a promising pianist and composer who had been a pupil of Nadia Boulanger’s, in Paris. Roth later claimed that Muriel saved his life—by the time he met her, he had lost his will to live. She was, like Walton, a Wasp from another world, and she became utterly devoted to Roth, ultimately renouncing her own artistic life and following him into poverty and obscurity.

The Roth mythology suggests that, having turned his back on writing, he immediately buried himself alive in menial work and rural Maine. But he made a stab at success and stability—driving to Hollywood in an ill-fated attempt to sell “Call It Sleep” to the movies and secure a screenwriting contract. Back in New York, he worked as a substitute high-school teacher and later trained as a precision-tool grinder, work that was deemed essential by the government and got him out of active service in the Second World War. Moving to Providence and then Boston, he worked in places with names like the Federal Products Company that capture perfectly the anonymity into which he was fading.

When Roth and Parker tired of urban squalor, they made the move to rural Maine. There, though he never wholly abandoned the dream of writing, and even sold two stories to The New Yorker, Roth descended into deepening silence. He burned his notebooks, fearing that they contained evidence of his continuing Communism. He gave away most of his books, and spent many nights sitting up late solving complicated math problems to keep his mind alive without the burden of introspection.

But while Roth was burrowing into Maine, killing geese for a living, raising two sons, and battling bouts of deep depression, his book was making its own strange journey. Never entirely forgotten, it began to turn up on lists of important neglected novels, championed by critics like Alfred Kazin. The writer and editor Harold Ribalow even tracked Roth down and got his permission for a reissue of “Call It Sleep,” which came out, in a small hardcover edition, in 1960. But everything changed when, in 1964, Peter Mayer, then a young editor at Avon, brought it out in paperback—he had learned about the book from a cabdriver—and Irving Howe gave it a glowing review on the cover of the Times Book Review. “Call It Sleep” became an instant best-seller and went looking for its lost master.

Roth grumbled about his newfound fame, but he was glad for the money and for the sense, once again, that he was a writer. He and his wife learned Spanish and travelled to Mexico and Spain, part of a dream that Roth had to write a play or novel about the Spanish Inquisition. The work was to have centered on a crypto-Jew, a converso who has secretly kept his faith. A single, superb short story, “The Surveyor,” which The New Yorker published in 1966, was all that came out of those grand plans, but Roth had begun to discover that he was the converso and perhaps had kept the faith after all.

The next turning point in Roth’s creative and emotional life, after the rediscovery of “Call It Sleep,” was the Six-Day War. Suddenly, Roth saw Jews as fighters who were as tough as the Irish kids he had known in Harlem. And he saw the Soviet Union, which he had once idealized, allied with Arabs bent on annihilating the Jewish state. Roth, who was starting to come to terms with his painful personal history, also began to embrace Jewish history and his own place in it, and to feel that the two were intertwined.

Roth later said that Joyce had been a pernicious influence on him, because Stephen Dedalus, and Joyce himself, wanted to fly past the nets of “nationality, language, religion.” Roth had tried to do the same, but he came to realize that it was only by flying into history, into peoplehood and particularity, that he could truly be free. He began studying Hebrew, and his modern political affiliation merged with an ancient Biblical one. He dated the destruction of his writer’s block to 1967, though he did not in fact begin writing his second novel until 1979.

That final work was an autobiographical epic, “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” which appeared in four volumes in the nineteen-nineties and has just been reissued in paperback by Picador. The title comes from Shakespeare, and its initials, Roth liked to point out, spell mors, the Latin word for death. Intending it to be, in part, a confession, Roth first considered publishing it only posthumously, but he consented to begin publication after the death of his wife, in 1990. (The third and fourth volumes were published posthumously—Roth died in 1995—and there remains a batch of manuscripts that were to form the final volumes of what was projected to be a six-part work.)

The novel follows the contours of Roth’s life, beginning just after the main character, named Ira Stigman, moves to Harlem from the Lower East Side, and ending with his decision to get out of Harlem and move in with a character based on Eda Lou Walton. The immigrant family, with its casual hysteria and implosive anxiety, is still a powerful force in the novel, but its members are more modulated, less monochromatic, than the family in “Call It Sleep.” The father is similarly prone to fits of violent rage, but he is a small man, easily cowed, who at one point tells Ira that he wanted to be a fiddler and play at weddings. Ira’s mother is less monumental but more complex than the martyred Yiddishe mama of “Call It Sleep.” Every time she mentions God, she mutters “if there is a God,” and she stands up to her husband when he rails:

“Say that again and I’ll fling something at your head!”

“Fling,” Mom challenged. “A novelty.”

In “Call It Sleep,” the father was the engine of violence and cruelty, but here Ira’s own desires are at the center. The novel’s dark heart is Ira’s incest with his sister, and Ira is the most pitilessly portrayed character. As he sits at the Shabbat table half-listening to his mother’s laments—“Who could help but surrender to that contralto richness of feeling in which everything she uttered was steeped?”—he thinks of his sister: “ravening to get her every chance he had, and even though her dating had made her off limits for several years now, he desired her nonetheless.”

But Ira is not simply the young protagonist of the book; he is also its author—an old man very like Roth, intermittently addressing his computer, who is called Ecclesias. The name is a perfect fusion of the Joycean and the Biblical: Leopold Bloom lived on Eccles Street; Roth, having turned his back on Joyce, is now, he seems to be saying, at home in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Occasionally, the computer speaks back, and these exchanges—printed in a different typeface—between the wry old man and his modern machine are among the many delights of the book.

“Mercy of a Rude Stream” is a strange, misshapen, wonderful novel about a young man falling apart as a person even as he is finding himself as an artist. This dynamic is reversed in the sections where the old writer speaks aloud, to himself or to his computer, recalling the ways in which the artist fell apart but, in some measure through the love of his wife—referred to in the novel only as “M”—recovered his humanity and, eventually, an aspect of his art. Life being what it is, this last stage of artistic recovery is accompanied by the physical collapse of the reborn artist, whose health woes are chronicled with excruciating fidelity. (Roth is among the few novelists—one thinks of Saul Bellow in his last novel, “Ravelstein”—who have entered old age wearing a headlamp.) One of Roth’s working titles for his epic was “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Fiasco,” and the brutal, almost posthumous scrutiny he subjects himself to, along with his irony and humor, make the over-all work at once anti-sentimental and deeply moving.

The first volume has a sort of circling slowness that is likely to disappoint anyone expecting the explosive modernism of “Call It Sleep.” Ira does not even have a sister in Volume I—she appears, magically, in the second volume, when Ira overcomes his ambivalence and his computer tells him that “the unspoken and unspeakable must become spoken and speakable, and the taboo broken and ignored.” The work, heroically edited and shaped by Robert Weil—who did not read Volume II until Volume I was in print and regretted not having been able to merge the two—is full of cracks and seams, but somehow these become vital elements of the novel.

The old writer’s musings offer a kind of commentary on the book as it is taking shape, questioning, among other things, the wisdom of Ira’s confession of incest: “Why was he doing this, demeaning himself—and perhaps Jews, the multitude of Jews who had transformed one previous novel into a shrine, a child’s shrine at that.” And though it’s clear that Roth felt he was liberating himself—the third volume is called “From Bondage”—the narrator also indulges dark, grandiose fears that his confession of sin will contribute to the destruction of the Jews:

In other words, in the confusion and alarm in his soul, he feared he was laying a basis for a new Final Solution. Look at the scum these Jews are. Why should they not be annihilated? How else could he say it? It was in the old sense, in the Biblical sense, that they suffered—because they had sinned, because he had sinned. He had been guilty of abomination.

The analytical urge, however, can’t obliterate the mimetic power of Roth’s writing—his ear for dialogue, his detailed urban evocations, or the sensual fury with which he describes his incestuous trysts. “Mercy of a Rude Stream” lives at the border of fiction and memoir. It is radically postmodern in its disregard for formal structure, and yet it has an almost classical purity, harking back to the spiritual confessions out of which early English novels like “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and “Robinson Crusoe” emerged. But the multiple voices in Roth’s book, the sense that life is a dialogue, if not an argument, draws on another tradition altogether. Roth, who once observed that had he remained on the Lower East Side he might have become a rabbi, makes his second novel a commentary on the first. “Call It Sleep” functions almost like the Torah, an ur-text from another age, while “Mercy of a Rude Stream” is like the Talmud, a series of commentaries and revisions that enforce the authority of that primal text even as they transform it. The fourth volume of “Mercy of a Rude Stream” actually takes a line from rabbinic literature as an epigraph: “Not thine the labour to complete, / And yet thou art not free to cease!”

Roth stands at the intersection of the American and the Jewish more fully than the more famous, and more assimilated, Jewish writers of a later generation. His themes—of flight and return, of mysterious election and abandonment, of the journey into a wilderness that yields a kind of redemption—are vital American themes as well as vital Jewish ones. Indeed, it is one of Roth’s achievements to make the American novel seem like a subset of the Jewish one, just as America itself can seem a kind of commentary on the Bible.

Roth went forward artistically by going backward. The narrator of “Mercy of a Rude Stream” keeps bursting into story and then tearing the story apart with commentary. This rabbinic approach gave Roth a way out of the hermetic modernism that had oppressed him. Although ambivalent about the deceiving nature of fiction itself, he ultimately affirms its power. Arguing with himself, arguing with James Joyce, fretting about Israel, heaping praise on his computer and scorn on his body, he writes in the face of departing memory and approaching death with a vitality that exceeds that of much contemporary fiction.

It is not surprising to learn from Kellman that Philip Roth—whose own autobiography has a coda written by a fictional character—contemplated writing a novel about his namesake. What American writer wouldn’t be tempted to tell a story that begins at the gates of Ellis Island and moves through the radicalizing hardships of the Great Depression, the psychic traumas of family abuse, the seductions of Communism, and the lure of the American West before arriving at the promise of regeneration through confession and atonement and acceptance of self? But Henry Roth lived long enough to become his own descendant, a ghost writer who came back from the dead to tell his story. ♦